It is well past time for Americans on the right to stop calling their movement conservative. Before we can have anything to conserve, we must first take it back.
Tag: conservatism
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Limits and Hope: Against the Anti-Tragedy Agenda of the Left
Once the right allowed the left to frame politics as the avoidance of tragedy, they lost the game. We’d do well to reconsider what Christopher Lasch called the “limits and hope” of politics.
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An Inept Takedown of William F. Buckley
PBS’s “Incomparable Mr. Buckley” offers a left-wing caricature of a complex man and the conservative way of life he advocated.
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Understanding the Shifting Realities of the Right
Historical circumstances make realignments inescapable and attempts to define “conservatism” apart from an understanding of these shifts results in wild mischaracterizations.
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Why I’m Not Cheering for AIPAC
It’s not the job of American conservatives to be loudly endorsing the taking down of American politicians who are critical of Israel.
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Against Political Clichés
Being human is something far more complex and beautiful than the habit of ideological repetition can show us. We miss that if we submit to the current morphing of reality in the service of clichés that condemn us to an inanimate fake life.
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A Conservative Self-Critique
The Up From Conservatism anthology contains some insightful, biting critiques of the conservative establishment, but its contributors are part of an elite class themselves, with their own sacred cows and taboos.
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Three Conceptions of Conservatism
Editor-in-chief Paul Gottfried offers an examination of three major streams of conservative thought, based on aristocratic tradition, universal principles, and the pragmatic pursuit of power.
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Conservatism After Defeat
Edmund Burke’s statement of government as a compromise and a sharing of power is no longer relevant today. The world has been remade since Burke's warnings, unfortunately.
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A Flawed Primer on ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’
The book Partisans is a product of contemporary political discourse—made up of cut-and-paste, second- and third-hand source-filled rants—that fails to pass for serious scholarship.
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Don’t Rock the Boat, I’m Counting My Money
D.C. swamp creatures who attack paleocons and other conservatives outside of the mainstream seem unable to comprehend that recovering our liberty demands overturning, not defending, our ruling oligarchy.
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The Hitler of Legend
Contrary to the standard view of historians, Hitler was not a conservative with pre-World War I aristocratic values, but a radical revolutionary who upended the traditional German power structure.
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The Great Conservative Death Wish
The unremitting success of the left’s march through Western institutions hardly suggests that liberals suffer from a death wish; on the contrary, it is conservatism that appears to be consuming itself.
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Conservative Gatekeeping
Conservatism Inc. has a long history of purging undesirables who challenge its party lines, but those in charge of the movement typically hide this practice.
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Books in Brief: December 2022
Short reviews of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti, and The Black Boom, by Jason Riley.
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Remembering Michael Oakeshott
Michael Oakeshott warned that rationalism in politics leads to rigid, rule-bound governance, and to the imposition of the state's enterprise over and against the free association of individuals.
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The Principled Fight
Those on the right would do well to look to Edmund Burke as a common example in discerning the principles at stake in our present struggle, as well as the character and conduct needed to win.
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Why Russia and China Are More Conservative Than the West
Despite their Communist past and present, Russia and China are demonstrably more conservative in many ways than present-day, self-hating America.
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The Failure of Liberalism and the Conservative Crisis of Faith
The crisis of conservatism stems from the failure of classical liberalism and the resultant politicization of the economy. Big State meets Big Capital to create our present-day arrangement: woke capitalism.